If I Could Only Automate One Thing in Your Business, I'd Pick Your Approvals

Ask a team where their time goes and nobody says "approvals."

But watch the process for a week and it's everywhere.

A request sits in someone's inbox for three days. The requester follows up over chat. The manager approves it verbally in a hallway, and now there's no record of the decision. Somebody forwards the thread to finance, who asks a question that was already answered two emails ago.

None of this is anyone's fault. It's just what happens when a decision process runs on email.

What I actually build instead

For one client, I designed a multi-branch approval workflow with Power Automate on top of Dataverse. Every request gets routed automatically to the right manager based on its type. Reminders fire on their own. And depending on the outcome, the flow triggers different operational actions.. approved requests kick off the next step immediately, rejected ones notify the requester with the reason.

What changes in practice:

• Decisions that took days now take hours, because nobody is chasing anybody
• Every approval has a timestamped record. Who approved, when, and why
• Managers stop being bottlenecks, because the system does the routing and the reminding
• Nothing falls through when someone is on leave. Requests re-route

Why approvals first

Two reasons.

First, approvals sit in the middle of everything else. Purchasing, leave, expenses, document sign-offs, client onboarding. Fix the approval layer and every process that depends on it speeds up with it.

Second, it's one of the fastest wins on Power Platform. If your team is already on Microsoft 365, an approval flow builds in days and runs inside the tools people already use. Approvals land in Teams and Outlook, where your managers already live.

The honest caveat

The build is the easy part. The work that matters is mapping the decision rules first. Who approves what, at which amounts, and what happens on the edge cases.

If those rules only exist in one manager's head, that's the real project. Automating an undefined process just makes the confusion arrive faster.

If your approvals still run on email and follow-ups, I can usually tell you in one conversation whether this is a quick win for your setup. It usually is.